By IANS
Raipur : Protests over acquiring 5,098 acres continue to dog Tata Steel’s proposed project in Chhattisgarh’s southern Bastar region. The district’s top official says the acquisition is moving forward. But protesters — from Left parties and tribal groups – contest this.
“The land takeover process and compensation distribution for 4,000 acres of land in eight of the 10 affected villages is in full swing here. So far, a compensation amount of over Rs.220 million has been distributed,” Ganesh Shankar Mishra, collector of Bastar district, told IANS over telephone Monday.
“Everything is going peacefully here. Farmers opposing the Tata plant earlier were happy to accept attractive compensation packages and allow the government to take over their plots to pass on to Tata for industrialisation,” Mishra said.
But former legislator Manish Kunjam, who has been leading protests against the project, said: “The administration and Tata agents are resorting to rumours, misguiding and terrorising farmers.”
“No one is ready for land handover. The protests are still strong as ever. Tata agents and local administration have been adopting all sorts of tactics to take farmers to the collector’s office,” Kunjam told IANS.
Tata Steel had inked a deal with Chhattisgarh government in June 2005 to set up a five million tonnes per annum steel plant in two phases with an investment of Rs.100 billion.
Tata’s steel project needs 5,098 acres of land in Lohandiguda block of the insurgency-hit Bastar district, about 325 km south of state capital Raipur.
Significantly, the land takeover process picked up after Nov 5, when over 75,000 tribals armed with bows and arrows marched through the streets in Jagdalpur, 25 km from the proposed site.
The protesters vowed to “step up the struggle against meaningless industrialisation in Bastar at the cost of driving out thousands of decade-old impoverished local tribes from their ancestral houses and lands”.
The Nov 5 rally was organised by Akhil Bharatiya Adivasi Mahasabha, an umbrella organisation of tribal groups.
Supporters of various Communist parties attended the rally in large numbers. Communist Party of India (CPI) general secretary A.B. Bardhan and Mahasabha national president and former CPI legislator from Bastar’s Konta assembly segment Manish Kunjam announced at the rally they would “take the anti-Tata battle to any level”.